The previously promised feature rolled out today.

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As promised, Google has rolled out new key features for Gmail. Native offline mail support is now available after it was promised as a follow-up to the major redesign that launched late last month. You have to be using Chrome as your Web browser to access this feature, though.

Further Reading

Additionally, Google has launched Smart Compose. This feature was unveiled at Google I/O last week. It's a predictive text feature, but it goes beyond the word-completion and autocorrect features we normally see by suggesting complete sentences for your emails based on AI analysis of your emails' text.

Offline mail

This is the first time Gmail has supported offline use without additional software or extensions. Google previously offered offline email through Google Gears in ages past as well as a Chrome extension. Now it's baked right into Gmail natively, so Google is encouraging users to uninstall the old extension in favor of this feature.

Google has published a short support page explaining how to set up and use the feature and what its limitations are. The most critical limitation is that it's only supported on the Chrome Web browser—Chrome 61 or later, specifically.

Offline mail works by syncing information with the servers each time you connect. In other words, you can read mail, archive it, and perform other functions while offline, and the actions will take effect on Google's servers once you are back online.

Want to turn on offline mode? Start by going to settings in the new Gmail. Remember: you have to be using Chrome 61 or later.

Samuel Axon

Not much will appear until you check the checkbox to enable offline mail.

Samuel Axon

Once you've enabled offline mail, you can choose how many days back to store emails or choose what happens to stored emails when you log out of Gmail while offline.

Samuel Axon

Before your settings are saved, Gmail warns you that this is not a good idea if you're on a shared device.

Samuel Axon

The feature is enabled in the "offline" tab of settings in the new Gmail. Those using "classic Gmail" must use the old, extension-based method. Offline mail defaults to "off." Once you check the box to enable it, several settings are revealed.

You can specify how far back emails are stored—the options are the last seven days, 30 days, or 90 days—and whether to store attachments. There are also two security options for what happens to locally stored data when you log off.

The options are:

Keep offline data on my computer: Data stored on your device will not be deleted when signing out of your Google account or when changing your password. To delete account data from your device disable offline mail and save changes.

Remove offline data from my computer: Data will need to be resynced to your computer when logging back into Gmail. It may take a few hours to resync the mailbox.

The feature is available to all users who are on the latest versions of Chrome and Gmail.

Smart Compose

Announced at the Google I/O conference, Smart Compose continues Google's focus on AI-driven features. It suggests entire phrases and sentences based on analysis of your emails.

Further Reading

To use Smart Compose, you have to enable access to experimental features, which only works on the new Gmail, which Google explains in another support page. These are the instructions for enabling it, via that page:

In the top right corner, click SettingsSettings and then Settings. If you haven't started using the new Gmail yet, click Try the new Gmail.

Under "General," scroll down to Experimental Access.

Click the box to Enable experimental access.

At the bottom of the page, click Save changes.

The feature is neat, but as one might expect, it doesn't work well if you stray from the usual phrases and email formats.

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Samuel Axon
Based in Los Angeles, Samuel is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he covers Apple products, display technology, internal PC hardware, and more. He is a reformed media executive who has been writing about technology for 10 years at Ars Technica, Engadget, Mashable, PC World, and many others. Emailsamuel.axon@arstechnica.com//Twitter@SamuelAxon

Why is it only available on Chrome? Are the other browsers behind on implementing some web standard?

Closed loop programming. Target your product first, you know what it does and doesn't support. Then tackle the other browsers you don't control. Pretty much SOP for el Goog ever since they introduced Chrome.

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Join our premium service to enable polygamy and date two or more people at once*

*virtually- actual human interaction cannot be supported until we can make you watch ads before sexual encounters.

I swear I have seen this before with a different company and web browser combination.

Google has done this a bunch of time and usually followed with supporting other browsers. For example, YouTube TV initially only worked on Chrome but recently started to work on Firefox as well. To be fair , chrome tends to be at the cutting edge of web standard and many of those standards are proposed by chrome team in order to do something in the browser that wasn't possible before. That means that these standards tend to be included first on chrome. That doesnt mean that other browsers are forever excluded.

Webrtc standard was a tug of war between Google and Microsoft until a compromise was reached. So it was a standard in flux and chrome supported several prestandard versions until eventually the final version was supported.

Sometimes it works the other way round. For example, nacl was a chrome only tech but Firefox with ASM was more successful and then became the web assembly standard which was first introduced by Firefox.

Using Thunderbird as I do, I don't get particularly excited by Google's antics regarding their email system. Considering how often that's been tweaked, kicked, hosed, fucked up, torn down, rebuilt, retweaked and renovated, I got sick of the changes and consolidated everything into one UI.

It may not be cutting edge, but the bleeding experienced by those riding that edge is something I'm glad to avoid these days. I'll leave that up to the intrepid souls who are more willing to donate their time and energy to Google's cause.

Why is it only available on Chrome? Are the other browsers behind on implementing some web standard?

The standard is basically a system that allows <meta> header tags and javascript to control how webpages are cached.

Essentially instead of trusting the browser to decide what should be cached and when the cached page is used instead of a freshly downloaded version, the page can tell the browser to always use the cache for some things (almost everything) and never use the cache for other things (eg checking if there are new emails) and finally control what exactly what should happen if the browser has just downloaded some new updated cached data.

FireFox was the first to implement partial support in 2008. In 2009 Safari and FireFox both had full support for the standard, and chrome added it in 2010 (in those days Chrome was still a fork of Safari, so they would have inherited the feature). IE followed in 2012.

There may have been bugs in the early days, but now it's 2018 and every implementation should be mature and reliable.

Apple in particular wanted this to be used in the early days of the iPhone, when cellular data was slow and expensive. The motivation was to use offline content even where internet connectivity is available. Uptake of this technology was poor, however Apple's implementation was and still is solid.

I don't think there is any reason for this to be limited to Chrome, at best they are relying on something that's not part of the web standard... but that's a weak excuse to me, since the standard should provide everything needed to get it to work.

Using Thunderbird as I do, I don't get particularly excited by Google's antics regarding their email system. Considering how often that's been tweaked, kicked, hosed, fucked up, torn down, rebuilt, retweaked and renovated, I got sick of the changes and consolidated everything into one UI.

It may not be cutting edge, but the bleeding experienced by those riding that edge is something I'm glad to avoid these days. I'll leave that up to the intrepid souls who are more willing to donate their time and energy to Google's cause.

Alas, T-bird is not available under Android. I use K-9 Mail because it sorta looks a bit like T-bird, but it doesn't have any of the useful features. With the Gmail web interface becoming less horrific, it may be time to switch to it.

I'm always on the lookout for a decent email client that is supported on Windows, Android, and Linux. Gmail in a browser is cross-platform and is becoming slightly less heinous to use so it will probably become my standard until something (anything!!!) better comes along.

I haven't read much about this but I'm assuming its using AI to predict what you are writing and using Google's phrases and sentences, not checking my history and predict how I would say something? So eventually everyone who uses this feature will all start to sound alike using the same phrases. I think that gives Google way too much power to influence the way our language evolves.

I swear I have seen this before with a different company and web browser combination.

Google has done this a bunch of time and usually followed with supporting other browsers. For example, YouTube TV initially only worked on Chrome but recently started to work on Firefox as well. To be fair , chrome tends to be at the cutting edge of web standard and many of those standards are proposed by chrome team in order to do something in the browser that wasn't possible before. That means that these standards tend to be included first on chrome. That doesnt mean that other browsers are forever excluded.

Webrtc standard was a tug of war between Google and Microsoft until a compromise was reached. So it was a standard in flux and chrome supported several prestandard versions until eventually the final version was supported.

Sometimes it works the other way round. For example, nacl was a chrome only tech but Firefox with ASM was more successful and then became the web assembly standard which was first introduced by Firefox.

I would argue that anything that *requires* the cutting edge does not meet the definition of standard, regardless of what some group says. Words have meaning.

Either way, it's still a bullshit excuse. The nessecary standards needed for these features are already widely supported. Google is being anti-competitive in their business decisions when it comes to browsers, and we should always call them out on that.

I haven't read much about this but I'm assuming its using AI to predict what you are writing and using Google's phrases and sentences, not checking my history and predict how I would say something? So eventually everyone who uses this feature will all start to sound alike using the same phrases. I think that gives Google way too much power to influence the way our language evolves.

Part of my brain wants to say that's crazy talk, and there's no way that will happen.

The rest of my brain is pretty sure this is how creativity dies, and what Google (and others) are doing will retard our society. All the little things add up. Cultural inbreeding? I think I'm going to put down my phone for a while.

Using Thunderbird as I do, I don't get particularly excited by Google's antics regarding their email system. Considering how often that's been tweaked, kicked, hosed, fucked up, torn down, rebuilt, retweaked and renovated, I got sick of the changes and consolidated everything into one UI.

It may not be cutting edge, but the bleeding experienced by those riding that edge is something I'm glad to avoid these days. I'll leave that up to the intrepid souls who are more willing to donate their time and energy to Google's cause.

Alas, T-bird is not available under Android. I use K-9 Mail because it sorta looks a bit like T-bird, but it doesn't have any of the useful features. With the Gmail web interface becoming less horrific, it may be time to switch to it.

I'm always on the lookout for a decent email client that is supported on Windows, Android, and Linux. Gmail in a browser is cross-platform and is becoming slightly less heinous to use so it will probably become my standard until something (anything!!!) better comes along.

As a long time Thunderbird user, I find AquaMail (pro is worth it) on Android the most similar in "feel" - and I've tried dozens. I don't think it exists anywhere but Android, however. For me the appeal is that it has a fairly clean interface for day to day use, but a zillion settings options - meaning that you have very fine grained control of how it works. That's what makes it feel like Thunderbird to me :I can generally make it behave how I want, then just get on with using it.

When on my phone is just faster to use the default Android e-mail app, the one that comes with Android. I guess I could use this on Desktop but that's what I use Thunderbird for. Yes sometimes I do use Gmail on web, but I miss the simplicity of the old html version.

I haven't read much about this but I'm assuming its using AI to predict what you are writing and using Google's phrases and sentences, not checking my history and predict how I would say something? So eventually everyone who uses this feature will all start to sound alike using the same phrases. I think that gives Google way too much power to influence the way our language evolves.

Part of my brain wants to say that's crazy talk, and there's no way that will happen.

The rest of my brain is pretty sure this is how creativity dies, and what Google (and others) are doing will retard our society. All the little things add up. Cultural inbreeding? I think I'm going to put down my phone for a while.

It is already happening. It's standard now for phones to use AI for typing corrections and auto-completions.

We all have different typing habits and also we tend to make our own unique typos that need to be corrected, so it has to be tailored to each person.

Not sure about Google, but Apple even adjusts the language based on the recipient of your message... just checking now in iMessage and I get "Ok | Yep | Nah" as suggested replies to my girlfriend, and for my boss I get "Yes | Tomorrow | Sorry no".

There's no doubt these systems are changing the words we choose to use.

Just because the W3C says they will remove something doesn't mean it will actually happen — the consortium backtracks on planned changes all the time.

I'd consider the current situation to be especially unstable, since every major browser vendor has been pulling out of the consortium — previous releases of HTML 5 listed Google/Microsoft/Apple employees as the primary editor group. The current draft doesn't list anyone from any major browser, which tells me they're loosing touch with what actually matters (the implementations of the standards).

When/if it is finally removed, no doubt browsers will continue to support it for many more years afterwards. Browsers usually only remove features if there's a really good reason to do so (eg if it affects privacy or makes the rendering engine slow). There's really no reason to remove App Cache from browser implementations.

The web development industry has never really followed the standards - they often take forever to include features that everybody has been using for ages (like `image-set` in CSS), and other times they spend years working on things nobody wants or needs that will never be implemented (eg XForms and XHTML 2.0).

* image-set has been in browsers for six years and is widely used by web developers, but I can't find any mention of it in the current spec* XForms was originally published (as a "mature" standard) by the W3C in 2003, and followup specs were released through to 2009, but the closest it ever got to being implemented was a FireFox extension... and that doesn't even work anymore.

The standard is a great tool for browsers to be as consistent as possible, but ultimately it's the browser vendors who decide what actually is available for use. I'd argue right now App Cache is the most widely supported option and it's what should be used, knowing you might have to transition to some replacement in the future. Right now it looks like Service Workers will replace it, but that may be another dead end.

Regardless of all that... Chrome isn't the only browser to support Service Workers. Pretty much all modern browsers have Service Workers. That's not the reason this is limited to Chrome.

Using Thunderbird as I do, I don't get particularly excited by Google's antics regarding their email system. Considering how often that's been tweaked, kicked, hosed, fucked up, torn down, rebuilt, retweaked and renovated, I got sick of the changes and consolidated everything into one UI.

It may not be cutting edge, but the bleeding experienced by those riding that edge is something I'm glad to avoid these days. I'll leave that up to the intrepid souls who are more willing to donate their time and energy to Google's cause.

Alas, T-bird is not available under Android. I use K-9 Mail because it sorta looks a bit like T-bird, but it doesn't have any of the useful features. With the Gmail web interface becoming less horrific, it may be time to switch to it.

I'm always on the lookout for a decent email client that is supported on Windows, Android, and Linux. Gmail in a browser is cross-platform and is becoming slightly less heinous to use so it will probably become my standard until something (anything!!!) better comes along.

For Android, try BlackBerry Hub. It costs a small amount of money on non-BlackBerry Androids, but it is available for all Androids from the Play Store. It is excellent. By the time you have bolted all your email and social media accounts into it you'll be amazed at how easy message management becomes. BlackBerry also do an excellent calendar, contacts, notes apps too. All this is free on a BlackBerry Motion.

I'm using Outlook on Windows. This is really good, though Google do their very best to ruin it. When you travel abroad, Google can't believe that your Outlook's log in is legitimate, so you have to log in through Gmail in a browser to re-authorise what they think is a new device. Ridiculous. (British Telecom's imap services does the same thing, annoyingly). My solution to these problems is to use an Exchange server, and not gmail.

There's really nothing like Outlook for Linux. Thunderbird and Evolution just don't come close to doing the same things.

Offline mode for Gmail makes me laugh. Having indirectly disparaged the concepts of a traditional mail client with Web based Gmail for a long time now, they're beginning to implement just that very thing, and not even as a pure HTML 5 Web app (coz it would work in other browsers if it were).

When/if it is finally removed, no doubt browsers will continue to support it for many more years afterwards. Browsers usually only remove features if there's a really good reason to do so (eg if it affects privacy or makes the rendering engine slow). There's really no reason to remove App Cache from browser implementations.

While this is true, newer browser updates are tightening up controls around app cache, effectively breaking many older sites that use it. Firefox 60, for example, requires HTTPS to use app cache, and Chrome, Edge, and Safari (links c/o Mozilla) have stated that they will do the same. Chrome 65 also won't accept the manifest if the content type isn't "text/cache-manifest".

Besides, in reality noone (well, hopefully) is developing _new_ implementations based on app cache since it's incredibly constrictive and horrible to work with. I can "guarantee" you that Gmail doesn't use it.

There's also not much point in reference W3C specs, since all major browsers consider the whatwg specs when discussing these subjects. This blog post pretty much sums up why

Regardless of all that... Chrome isn't the only browser to support Service Workers. Pretty much all modern browsers have Service Workers. That's not the reason this is limited to Chrome.

I agree, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

Tbh, I can't see _any_ Chrome 61 features that would be required for offline Gmail. It may just be a case of "it's a beta feature that we've only tested in Chrome", or "we've had issues in some other browsers, but we'll sort them out later"

Speaking of browsers, anyone else have the mobile interface break on desktop google chrome? For me the top left and right menus are broken, clicking on posts via usernames takes me to the post on the forum view and not the article post view.

I haven't read much about this but I'm assuming its using AI to predict what you are writing and using Google's phrases and sentences, not checking my history and predict how I would say something? So eventually everyone who uses this feature will all start to sound alike using the same phrases. I think that gives Google way too much power to influence the way our language evolves.

What worries me about this is that now business dweebs won't have to repeat the grammar and jargon du jour as the machine will do it for them.

Valley Dweeb in Patagonia vest wrote:

Subject: IMPT => client ask

Ryan--Hope you're doing well!About MC's ask from yesterday: I think we need to double-click on that a little bit and better understand where the client is coming from, so we can manage their expectations and deploy the right resources.LMK your thoughts.-cj

I remember the Gears version. Used it back in the Firefox 3.6 days, and it was pretty cool since it let you use the same UI offline. Eventually it stopped working, maybe with Firefox 4? And the extension-based one didn't have the same UI, using a mobile-like UI instead IIRC, so I wasn't interested in it. That was probably the first notable instance where I was disappointed in a GMail change.

I would say good for them bringing it back, but making it support only their browser is definitely not cool. It's not 1996 anymore, and "works best in Chrome 61+" is no better than "works best in Netscape 4.0+" or "works best in IE 3+".

Using Thunderbird as I do, I don't get particularly excited by Google's antics regarding their email system. Considering how often that's been tweaked, kicked, hosed, fucked up, torn down, rebuilt, retweaked and renovated, I got sick of the changes and consolidated everything into one UI.

It may not be cutting edge, but the bleeding experienced by those riding that edge is something I'm glad to avoid these days. I'll leave that up to the intrepid souls who are more willing to donate their time and energy to Google's cause.

Alas, T-bird is not available under Android. I use K-9 Mail because it sorta looks a bit like T-bird, but it doesn't have any of the useful features. With the Gmail web interface becoming less horrific, it may be time to switch to it.

I'm always on the lookout for a decent email client that is supported on Windows, Android, and Linux. Gmail in a browser is cross-platform and is becoming slightly less heinous to use so it will probably become my standard until something (anything!!!) better comes along.

For Android, try BlackBerry Hub. It costs a small amount of money on non-BlackBerry Androids, but it is available for all Androids from the Play Store. It is excellent. By the time you have bolted all your email and social media accounts into it you'll be amazed at how easy message management becomes. BlackBerry also do an excellent calendar, contacts, notes apps too. All this is free on a BlackBerry Motion.

I'm using Outlook on Windows. This is really good, though Google do their very best to ruin it. When you travel abroad, Google can't believe that your Outlook's log in is legitimate, so you have to log in through Gmail in a browser to re-authorise what they think is a new device. Ridiculous. (British Telecom's imap services does the same thing, annoyingly). My solution to these problems is to use an Exchange server, and not gmail.

There's really nothing like Outlook for Linux. Thunderbird and Evolution just don't come close to doing the same things.

I'm sure BlackBerry Hub is fine, from what you say, but YetAnotherAnonymousAppellation was looking specifically for one email app for all their platforms, not just a good Android app.

----I realize tastes vary, but I'm always surprised when I run across someone who has used other desktop email applications, yet has praise for Outlook. I haven't used every email program under the sun, not by a long shot, but I've used quite a few (because I've been trying to find a worthy successor to Eudora for, what, 15 years now?) and almost none were worse than Outlook. AFAIC the only reason to use Outlook is because it's mandated, or maybe for the Exchange integration (though macOS Mail seems to handle Exchange pretty well)--though obviously that doesn't matter for anything using IMAP.

IME, the primary things that Outlook does and Thunderbird doesn't do are (1) get confused when the connection drops for more than a fraction of a second, (2) make strange decisions about content rendering, and (3) have trouble sorting chronologically with threaded conversations. In short, I never miss Outlook when using Thunderbird, but the inverse is a common occurrence.

Obviously, your experiences are different. What do you do with Outlook that Thunderbird can't do (or makes harder to do)?